Whiting: Philanthropist creates a 'living peace'

Sept. 24, 2013

Updated Sept. 25, 2013 6:33 a.m.

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Kelly Smith, founder of the Center for Living Peace in Irvine, hopes to provide answers to the world's problems. Her center seeks to help people connect to self and spirit through the idea "Good Happens." EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Kelly Smith, founder of the Center for Living Peace in Irvine, has big plans to host world-class speakers and change the world. Her center seeks to help people connect to self and spirit through the idea, "Good Happens." EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Moms Maegan Wenzel, left, and Shaylyn Blackburn seek their inner peace as they feel their breaths during the Baby and Me Yoga class at the Center for Living Peace in Irvine. The class meets three times per week for parents and kids up to 3 years old. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Shaylyn Blackburn of Newport Beach holds up her 13-month-old baby Addison in a yoga pose during the Baby and Me Yoga class at the Center for Living Peace in Irvine. The class meets three times per week for parents and kids up to three years old. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Maegan Wenzel, top, of Rancho Santa Margarita does a yoga pose with baby daughter Elizabeth during the Baby and Me Yoga class at the Center for Living Peace in Irvine. The class meets three times per week for parents and kids up to three years old. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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The Center for Living Peace in Irvine has big plans to host world-class speakers and change the world. The center offers glass jars where visitors can leave their messages and wishes. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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The Center for Living Peace in Irvine has big plans to host world-class speakers and change the world. The center hosts yoga classes and other holistic, peace-promoting events. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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The Center for Living Peace in Irvine has big plans to host world-class speakers and change the world. The center has a largely Asian-themed decor, while hosting yoga classes and other holistic, peace-promoting events. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Kelly Smith, founder of the Center for Living Peace in Irvine, hopes to provide answers to the world's problems. Her center seeks to help people connect to self and spirit through the idea "Good Happens."EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Living peace series

The first speaker for the Center for Living Peace 2013-2014 Event Series will appear Nov. 5 at 7 p.m.

Who: Eboo Patel is founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based organization building an interfaith movement on college campuses. He also served on President Obama's advisory council for faith-based and neighborhood partnerships.

Where, cost: UCI Student Center, Pacific Ballroom, $8.

More: LivingPeace.UCI.Edu.

Just when the founder of both a building and a mindset called the Center for Living Peace starts to soar into esoteric territory, Kelly Thornton Smith describes her mission in very down-to-earth terms.

This single mother of two teenagers explains her center – built on a belief that “good happens” – is a place for children and adults to connect with people from different backgrounds. It's also meant to inspire people to make a difference.

But this woman, who in the last three years has brought to Orange County the Dalai Lama, Sir Richard Branson, Charlize Theron, Queen Noor and Jane Goodall, isn't content with just building community.

Smith proposes creating a series of nonprofit centers to assist humankind to connect with what Smith calls our inner wisdom, our bliss. Confused?

Don't be. This woman – who employs three names, lives in Newport Beach and has enough money to be called a philanthropist – is no dilettante.

Smith's as grounded as the cornstalks that grew near her childhood home.

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Walking into the Center for Living Peace, nestled in an outdoor mall near UCI's campus, is a bit like talking to a visionary, which Smith certainly is. At first, there are things that might make some decide it's a New Age place in the worst way.

If those inward-oriented classes seem headed toward outer space, understand there also are outward sessions. Every Saturday in August, the center sponsored Summer Service Days in which participants helped collect school supplies for refugee children and displaced American families.

Sure, the center may seem a long way from Smith's Delaware roots – but only if you haven't lived in a town of 3,700 where people naturally help one another.

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Smith grew up in Laurel, Del. With a median household income less than one-third of Orange County's, Laurel is far different from some parts of our gold coast.

From her carpenter father, president of the local Kiwanis, Smith learned about community. From her aunt, a court advocate for children, she learned about struggle. From her grandmother, in charge of a Head Start program, she learned about giving.

When Smith was in sixth grade, she revealed her spark to ignite change. Her mother was the science teacher for sixth, seventh and eighth grades. Although they got along great, Smith wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea of having Mom as a teacher three years in a row.

She petitioned the school board for a different instructor. But there were no other science teachers. Things worked out. But Smith learned something she never forgot.

“We try to change things,” she tells me, “but what we really should do is try to make the best of them.”

That very practical and very important concept never left Smith. At the University of Delaware, she majored in business administration and marketing.

After graduation, she fell in love and drove to San Francisco with a guy by the name of Vinny Smith, the man she'd marry. With a deep passion for high tech when Silicon Valley was starting to boom in the late 1980s, Smith prospered. Eventually, the couple moved to Orange County, where he invested in Quest Software, grew it from 25 employees to nearly 4,000 and sold it to Dell for, ahem, $2.4 billion.

Before you think Smith is a billionaire, don't. The couple's separation was before the transaction and, besides, corporate purchases are exceptionally complex. What's important is that Mom and Dad remain friends, work together to raise their children and that her ex supports the Center for Living Peace.

Still, the split launched Smith on her own spiritual journey.

“I went from being a mom and a wife to asking, ‘Who am I?'” Explaining what Smith calls her birthing of the center, she offers, “I learned to listen to what I needed to express – the idea that there are unlimited possibilities for good deeds.”

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During a wide-ranging conversation, we switch back and forth from Smith's vision for how to help the planet to her “all or nothing, let's roll” style of making things happen.

We swap skiing stories, and Thomas shares she took a horrific fall this past winter rocketing down a mountain in Aspen, a fall so bad she messed up her leg and knee and broke an arm. How fast was she going? She shakes her head, “It was like jumping out of a car.”

How bad was the break? She has a 7-inch scar on her shoulder that covers a metal plate and a half-dozen screws.

She suggests she needs to get better at listening to her body, learn to move with authority.

More authority than bombing a ski run? For a moment, I stare at Smith – baffled. My only thought is that I'm impressed with her life-grabbing attitude.

She laughs and explains that she needs to slow down a bit on the slopes. It's a shift to her practical side, the side that caused her to homeschool her children during their early years.

We discuss a mutual conviction that ubiquitous technology and the ease of moving through life while rarely stepping into sunlight or starlight is partly to blame for a growing and widespread disconnection to spirituality.

Connection to the natural world is something that the Buddha- and Bible-quoting Smith believes is key to what she refers to as discovering one's bliss, what she also calls wisdom or the voice of God.

Amen.

Smith offers a saying often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Pointing out the differences in how spirituality can be approached, she laughs softly and offers the same point with a very different quote, one sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “God so loved us he gave us beer.”

Then Smith zeroes in on her point: “The Center for Living Peace is within each of us.”

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